My sister decided that to take and post a photograph every day.
It seemed like a good way to force...self-encourage creativity. But I don't take photographs.
This blog will be my daily[ish] writings. Some days I may write poems, some days I'll write phrases or sentences. Since most of what I post here will probably fall into some category of poetry, I must quote Paul Valery, as he accurately stated that, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." So everything here is a work in progress.

12 April 2014

When the wood burns green,
But everything else is
Just as it should be,
When the dogs don’t bark,
And the kids don’t argue,
And the workday is already over,
Then there’s copper in the wood.
There shouldn’t be copper in the wood.
Things are worse than you thought.

10 April 2014

When the gems are gone,
And the diamonds crack,
When all the mines have caved in
And the wood is dead,
The animals bark and howl,
“Whatever.”

When the gas is burned,
And the half-lives die,
When the grid is smashed
And the bullets are extinct,
The people finally live
Again.

Kind of post-apocalyptic for day 10. Just finished watching Snowpiercer. An Ayn Randish movie out of South Korea (with Ed Harris and Tilda Swinton) about class warfare on a train that houses the last of humanity. The hero of the film has a line, "Bullets are extinct." He also has a line, "I know that babies taste best." That line wasn't as inspirational.

09 April 2014

Nothing goes up or down.
It just stagnates
Like wet grounds in the bottom of the filter.

Not a poem I'll be particularly proud of, or perhaps ever revisit. But I needed something quick for Day 9. I have NEVER actually completed NaPoWriMo by actually penning a poem every day. I would like this to be my year.

08 April 2014

On one day that I know well,
I will drink a dark beer .
I know that I will drink a dark beer,
Cupped in plastic, kissed by the air.
One day in the Vieux Carré.

They will want me to drink it from a football
Or a curving clear flute.
They will sneer
Because I won’t even sip
A syrup-dyed drink.
But I will have my dark beer.

On one day, perhaps in June,
In the frightful sweatiness of the Vieux Carré,
I will drink a dark beer.
My friends cast me down,
Strangers too. They all karaoke.
They won’t buy my next round.

I will, on that hot June day,
Finish a dark beer.
My friends they all cheer,
They pull up a stool, but I shake my head.
I wave them off. They know that
I’m going to drink another dark beer.

This is a little more lighthearted than anything I've yet written for NaPoWriMo this year. It's a my take on the Day 8 challenge at NaPoWriMo.net, which is rewriting a famous poem in your own style.The original poem by César Vallejo is here.

Just a final breath of your kerosene aroma.
One last, craning gaze at your titanium summit.
Before the T-minus counts the end of your days,
Before it says goodbye.

Your searing, white tail licks the concrete.
My palms pressed flat against the blast shield.
I don’t mind the hot rumble
As you spite gravity,
As you lift away from the mortal Earth.

If I could hyperspeed with you
Past the clouds
Until the atmosphere was a memory,
Until the world was small,
I would feed your fire with my lungs.
I would give you my oxygen to breathe.

Some of you may have noticed my obsession with space and other scientific themes. This was the perfect topic for the Day 7 challenge at NapoWriMo.net. Write a love poem about an inanimate object. The photo here is one that I took of a replica of a full sized Saturn V rocket at the U. S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I spent about a week there at Space Academy for Educators.

06 April 2014

Remnants and scraps?
Skin and smoke?
Dust is more
Than vagrant, floating flotsam.
It is the past without retreat.
It is the memory of
What we cannot remember.
Even the water in the clouds
Needs those particles to persist,
Are born
In the drifting Dust.

Defile the Dust?
Deny your ancestors?
Renounce your heritage
From every dead galaxy
And each star yet to be born
In the burning gravity of Dust?

There was a time before the light,
And there will be eons past
The hungry red demise of the Sun.
But even in the black contraction
Of the near empty
At the end of Space
The Dust remains.

Thank you, Tess Kincaid for this great visual prompt from Magpie Tales. The mood of my poem may not seem to come naturally from the photo, but that's what I got from the dust. I mean, doesn't dust just scream "The Law of Conservation of Mass" to you? I have a decent microphone now, so I'm also having lots of fun recording some of my poems. Happy day 6!

05 April 2014

What biographer
Will pen my discoveries?
What cartographer
Will stencil me to a continent?
What astrologer
Will remember my constellations?
What eavesdropper
Will spread my rumors?
What naysayer
Will doubt my legend?

02 April 2014

They say you can break a man apart
And put him back together,
Stronger, faster, better.
Bionic.

Wither him down to bones and marrow.
Scour his brain with bleach.
Whiteboard blank
Brand new.

And what man can build a man back better?
Bodybuild back his gaunt cadaver frame.
Reteach his every syllable.
Reprogram.

How can you decompose an entire lifetime?
How can you demolish a man?
What made your soul
So vile?

This is submitted to Three Word Wednesday. The words were decompose, gaunt, and vile. For some reason, it made me think immediately of the Science Fiction classic The Demolished Man, by Alfred Bester. I use the title in my last stanza. Thanks for reading!

How did Albert Einstein know
That when things get so heavy
Time moves so slow?

Continuums of gravity, space, and time
Are not exclusive,
But all intertwine.

You think he speaks of wormholes. Instead,
He’s describing the heaviness
Inside of my head.

When the morning arrives, I’d like to disprove
All his theories,
But the hands on my clock just won’t move.

Day 1 of NaPoWriMo. I uploaded it on day 2, but I assure you that it was written on Day 1. Inspiration is from Poetry Jam's prompt about time. I wanted to record it because it is a RARE attempt at rhyme for me and I wanted to show how I [think I] intended it to sound.